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Sunday, February 21, 2010

BD impressions: Ponyo

7:42 PM / BD Impressions / 11 Comments

I've heard PONYO described as a minor entry in Hayao Miyazaki's impressive resume, and that may be true, but I personally enjoyed it more than a number of his supposedly meatier films. It's not, I feel, the best animated movie of 2008 (that honour would go to WALL-E), but it's a fine piece of work, mesmerising to look at and refreshingly free of the clichés that infest just about every North American animated movie to one degree or another. As my brother puts it, "There are no kids exclaiming how they 'just want to believe in themselves' or how they want to please their fathers, etc."

Image quality: Reference. 10/10

This appears to be the same excellent encode that was used for the earlier Japanese release, with any differences in file size attributable to the differing language configurations. The US release that I watched lacks a lossless Japanese audio track, but I can't honestly say this bothered me in the slightest. As a matter of principle, I do feel that that every BD should come with a lossless audio track of the film's original language, just as I think every encode should use as much of the available disc space as possible, but in real world terms this is often simply splitting hairs. The number of times that I've actually noticed a difference between a lossy and a lossless track when both are included on the same disc is low indeed, and it's not as if I'm listening on completely crummy equipment or anything like that. A while back, a professional audio engineer compared the waveforms of Dolby Digital 448 Kbps, 640 Kbps, 1.5 Mbps, and lossless tracks and demonstrated that, while the jump from 448 Kbps to 640 Kbps should be noticeable to the naked ear, anything beyond that was virtually immaterial. If anyone has a link to that article, I'd be incredibly grateful.

PS. It's also worth pointing out that, in addition to artificial grain, Studio Ghibli have also inserted some "artificial gate weave". While I don't doubt that some will see these as negatives, I personally felt that they went a long way towards counteracting the deadness so often associated with digital animation.

Ponyo
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.18 Mbit/sec

11 Comments

 
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